NOVELL’s UNGERMANN-NETWORTH ALLIANCE VIES WITH ITS OWN NETWARE HUB SERVICES

By aligning with Ungermann Bass Inc and Networth Inc to turn network hubs into applications servers (CI No 1,917), Novell Inc has involved itself with two superficially contradictory strategies. In February, the company announced NetWare Hub Services and its Hub Management Interface, designed to enable file servers to host hub and routing functions – Ungermann […]

By aligning with Ungermann Bass Inc and Networth Inc to turn network hubs into applications servers (CI No 1,917), Novell Inc has involved itself with two superficially contradictory strategies. In February, the company announced NetWare Hub Services and its Hub Management Interface, designed to enable file servers to host hub and routing functions – Ungermann Bass immediately endorsed the idea. Now the same companies are following a track that turns hubs into application or file servers. The companies argue reasonably enough that it is a question of horses for courses. Dave Stone, Ungermann’s UK product marketing manager says that the ‘hub in a fileserver’ approach is best suited to small workgroups, while the ‘fileserver in a hub’ is aimed at the enterprise business where the company has a secure wiring closet holding a hub, but wants to lock its electronic mail gateways up too. And although Ungermann Bass is carefully refraining from presenting Access/Open as a replacement for fileservers, the fact remains that the chassis could well be used as a file server – it comes with either 120Mb or 568Mb hard drives. The Access/One and Access/Open Boxes are connected over a conventional network link, just as a standard file server and hub connection would be. For the future, the company is considering a special high-speed link using its Plusbus technology. In the meantime, the outstanding feature is a separate out-of-band link that lets the Ungermann’s NetDirector software manage it. Irving, Texas-based Networth – in which Ungermann has an equity stake is more explicit, asserting that it is not in the file server business. Its NetWare Application Engine, an 80486-based module with a 120Mb or 200Mb hard drive and between 4Mb and 32Mb of memory, will only support NetWare Runtime. Runtime is a crippled version of Novell’s operating system that lacks file-serving, and functions only to support NetWare Loadable Modules. The Engine plugs directly into any Series 4000 hub and apart from carrying on-board Ethernet, the serial and parallel ports have two spare AT slots. The UK launch is delayed until June 2 pending delivery of the first box from over the pond.